Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web

Before news aggregators, content curators, and Google’s omnipotent algorithm, the world’s information was sorted by real human beings. In the web’s next phase, argues Karyn Campbell, the old-fashioned editor is poised for a comeback.

If web 1.0 was about websites and 2.0 the power of network connectivity, whatever 3.0 looks like, better filters will play a big part.

The web has become too big and noisy. The design community has helped guide us through some of the slush, and search technology has made leaps filtering and personalizing information for us.

But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all.

Content beats search and social

Studies show that content sites drive much more traffic than search engines and social media links. Only 14 percent of readers or viewers arrive to content destinations via social networks, and search engines’ bite of the pie has diminished in the past year.

Google seems to have taken note: the search giant launched its aggregate Google News feed in 2002, boasting no human intervention. Last month, as RSS moved further toward the antique attic, Google invited professional news editors to highlight content on its U.S. news page.

As Google increasingly tracks our tastes via likes and clicks, serving us information and ads accordingly, it’s interesting to note the Drudge Report drives more than double the daily referral traffic to content sites than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Drudge still knows his audience’s tastes better than any algorithm. And this from a site that hasn’t been upgraded since before Google even existed!

Search and social become content

We’re witnessing the convergence of search engines, social networks and content publishers. Facebook is hiring news editors, YouTube is signing multimillion-dollar deals with professional filmmakers, and AOL is betting its future on the editorial direction of Arianna Huffington.

Once-automated networks will increasingly need to foster a voice to build loyalty. Consider Vimeo: one quarter of their staff is dedicated to community building and setting editorial mood.

The strategy? Find what’s good – even if it only has two views ­– connect with filmmakers or community members, and tip them off to new cultures and trends; there’s no app for that, at least not yet.

Curating the walled garden

As open platforms like YouTube and Google start to look more like media companies, walled gardens like Apple’s iTunes illustrate another approach to (excuse the term) “tastemaking.”

Not everyone can publish on iTunes. Call it snobbery, but it’s been a smart way to implement best-use standards. Plus, it’s not like iTunes is extremely picky. They simply require an extra step, which may weed out some sloppiness.

Apple’s insistence on tightly controlling what gets into the canon risks excluding potentially great products (or in iTunes’ case, artists). But perhaps offering less of the best makes buyers trust more in the product’s quality, relieving them of the doubt that comes with an abundance of choice.

Then again, Android has seen great adoption numbers using open software, allowing anyone to distribute an app. Time will tell if these two approaches meet somewhere in the middle.

It comes down to trust

The web has offered us incredible options for how we buy products, talk to our friends, or experience media. Remember that adage “quality over quantity”? We can take that phrase literally online – quantity won’t go away; quality will just sit atop.

Sometimes we want someone to tell us, consistently, what’s true and what’s good. No wonder YouTube just relaunched its music page, enlisting writers for Vice, Spin and other major vloggers to curate its featured content. As Steve Jobs more radically put it, “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

It comes down to trust. Because we are all so well trained in the art of branding, arguably at the expense of crafting things worthy of distribution, it becomes hard to trust the advice of a Wild West web.

Still, we’ll continue to take the word of our favourite industry insider, celebrity or uncle. Likewise, the smartest companies in this space will calibrate expertise with automation, math with emotion.

Whether she’s a kid writing code or a poet in-the-making, look for the next generation Steve Jobs to carry on building, hiring, and perfecting these filters.

Yes, human curation is important. Perhaps needless to say, it is subjective. It becomes “dangerous” or at least irritating (e.g., in Apple’s case) when the subjective judgment exercised by one human differ from the subjective standards available to another or others whom they affect. Standards for subjective judgments are difficult to set: who watches the watchers?

Good points made here. I did a survey on my website to see whether people still care about proof-reading of blog posts – and people really do. Editing and filtering content means people like me, librarians and editors, are proved to still have a role in this digital age of ours. But it’s important to keep reminding people of that!

its no wonder the ‘search engines’ are not getting you to these good content places, THEY ARE TOO BUSY REFERRING YOU TO THEIR GREEEEEEEEDY ADVERTISERS CRAP SITES! once they felt the warm, soft, flow of money between their fingers and legs, they sold everyone out.

You’re dead right about it coming down to trusting curators – particularly individuals. I like the vibe on TheBrowser – feels very Economist Magazine-y. Successful vibe creation.

But can you also trust the judgment of a community of curators (Digg) or a whole network of curators (NewsWhip)? It’s like collecting many individual judgments of whether something is worthy – but without any editor.

Editing material on the net…what a novel idea! I do my share of Google and You Tube, but I like to read “fan fiction” online, and if there were ever websites that needed editing, fan fictions’ do. Back in the before times (70’s & 80’s), people wanting to get their fiction to a wider audience than their posse would send them in to “fanzines”, and, for the most part, their stories would be checked for content, grammer, spelling, punctuation and general legibility by editors who would actually edit. As they were selling these ‘zines, sometimes for as much as $20 a pop, they would make sure that the content was worth the money you paid for it; corrections would be made, and stories would be rejected if they weren’t.
Segue to now…to a site like Fan Fiction.net, where all you need is a computer and internet access to self publish; and what you end up with is hundreds of thousands of fan written stories (divided into genres) that range from pro-level writing to stories so poorly written that it gives one pause regarding the American education system (Spellcheck is your friend..something that too many “authors” don’t realize). And of course the requests for comments seem almost always to be in inverse proportion to the quality of the story…the worst writers request (beg) for the most comments. But heaven forbid you give anything but a glowing comment: give a critique in a polite and helpful way…and it’s as if you’ve stomped their puppy. And no, no one puts a gun to your head to make you read, but you can’t always tell from the brief description you’re given, the literary horrors that lay ahead. Now I don’t know if it would be even possible to edit a huge repository of fiction such as that…and I admit…I like quick access to free fan fiction as much as the next person, but I do miss the days when you opened your fanzine with the firm knowledge that what was in there was worth the read.

Nice piece. You could also mention that human curation can come in machine-assisted forms. The act of sharing is a form of curation for example, but it needs a machine to make some sense of it for others. At Hearsay.it, we’re playing with the idea of sharing everything you read in our news reader with anyone who wants to follow you. That allows you to see a lot more stuff that other people are reading and opens up the possibility of seeing people just like you and letting them curate news for you just by reading it. Love to know what you think.

Nice article Karyn. I think the role of the editor has also been increased since the Google Panda update penalising sites with bad spelling and low quality content. Every site needs someone with a clear vision who can also copywrite the content.

[…] got me thinking was Karyn Campbell’s post Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web. And what is keeping me thinking is how, exactly, can I and my fellow ex-journos use our old […]

[…] got me thinking was Karyn Campbell’s post Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web. And what is keeping me thinking is how, exactly, can I and my fellow ex-journos use our old […]

[…] Before news aggregators, content curators, and Google’s omnipotent algorithm, the world’s information was sorted by real human beings. In the web’s next phase, argues The IdeaLists’ Karyn Campbell, the old-fashioned editor is poised for a comeback. […]

[…] If web 1.0 was about websites and 2.0 the power of network connectivity, whatever 3.0 looks like, better filters will play a big part. The web has become too big and noisy. The design community has helped guide us through some of the slush, and search technology has made leaps filtering and personalizing information for us.But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all….[read full article http://j.mp/qmS6iO&nbsp; […]

[…] While algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all. Google seems to have taken note: the search giant launched its aggregate Google News feed in 2002, boasting no human intervention. Last month, as RSS moved further toward the antique attic, Google invited professional news editors to highlight content on its U.S. news page. As Google increasingly tracks our tastes via likes and clicks, serving us information and ads accordingly, it’s interesting to note the Drudge Report drives more than double the daily referral traffic to content sites than Facebook and Twitter combined. […]

[…] got me thinking was Karyn Campbell’s post Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web. And what is keeping me thinking is how, exactly, can I and my fellow ex-journos use our old […]

[…] the right mix of familiarity and novelty, confirmation and healthy dissent. Karyn Campbell’s Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web on Sparksheet quotes interesting numbers which suggest that, as we’re figuring out what […]